Wimdu – the international expansion of an Airbnb-clone

The first time I mentioned the launch of Wimdu was in an article about German Airbnb clones last month. Now I just realized how quickly this startup, which is backed by Rocket Internet, has internationalized within the last weeks. Several national versions of Wimdu are already live (France, Spain, UK, Germany, Italy…). And of course, the young travel startup has many open positions to fill. On wimdu-jobs.com you’ll find job openings for various positions in over 20 countries. My guess is, that the international wimdu team already consists of over 60 people right now.

2 weeks ago we reported about the Chinese Wimdu-subsidiary called Airizu. The curious thing is, that this site is already down. If you now type in Airizu.com you are going to be redirected to Wimdu.com. We don’t know yet whether the Wimdu-team has stopped trying to enter the Chinese market or what else could have happened.

The attached Alexa-chart shows the course in relation to the daily reach of Wimdu, Airizu and 9flats. The competition between Airbnb, Wimdu and 9flats (just received a major investment) seems to get tougher every day. At the moment wimdu runs a voucher campaign (in different variations) to attract users to their platform. As there is no established platform in Europe yet (with the Airbnb-model), 9flats and wimdu have good chances to compete against the originator Airbnb in this market.

For those of you who are not familiar with the 9flats-/Airbnb-/Wimdu-model, I would recommend to watch the following Wimdu-commercial: